“Daisy and I live with my mother,” she tells me now. “In her house.”
“What sort of house is it?”
“It’s a special house, I suppose.” Her accent is North London. Born and bred. “A cottage, but it’s detached, right at the edge of the Heath, feels like being at the end of the world.” She smiles as she says this. Her teeth are straight. Orthodontic straight. She was cared for.
“What’s it like, living with your mum?”
She grimaces slightly but then smiles again. “Pros and cons. Mainly cons. She’s a difficult woman.”
“And where’s your dad?”
It takes her a moment to find an answer to this one. “No idea,” she replies eventually. “Disappeared ten years ago.”
“When Daisy was born?” I observe.
She shrugs.
“Where’d he go?”
“Who cares?”
She flashes her eyes at me, and I see it then, her sadness, her fear, her fury, her hate. I think: You are a cruel, unhappy person. I think: You have been hurt. I think: I want to help you.
“Another one?” I say, eyeing her glass. She shoots me a venomous look. She wants to say no. Tell me to fuck off. But she doesn’t.
She drinks the last inch in her glass and hands it to me. “Yes,” she says. “Please.”
Soon after that, school ends for the Christmas break and Jessamine cannot come to the pub during the day. I wonder what she does at home with her moody tween and her miserable mother in their house at the end of the world. Does she drink vodka out of a water bottle? Does Hugo get walked at all?
I wander down through the Vale of Health a few days after Christmas, pleasantly faded around the edges after a lazy, boozy few days with my big brother and his family of gigantic teenage boys in Banstead. I have brought a gift, or should I say aregift—a bottle of champagne (I hate the stuff), a card, and a Christmas stocking full of dog treats for Hugo that I picked up on sale from Tesco for ninety-nine pence. It’s a windswept kind of day, dots of rain in the air, the sky dark and grisly, but I’ve had a pint on the way through Hampstead and I’m feeling good about life.
I meander through the Vale—is this place even real? I wonder vaguely. Do people actually live here, in these Christmas-card houses? Or are they cardboard cutouts, lit up from inside, puppets moving behind windows?
At the end of the Vale, I have two options—left or right. I turn left just as the streetlights go on: a buzz, a fizz, a sudden transformation from gray to gold. At the farthest end of the street, I see it. A yellow cottage behind a gated driveway. It’s scruffy, unloved, wreathed in damp, pus-colored light. In front are a small red car that looks as if it is never driven, an oldarmy jeep, and a trampoline with two broken springs. A small plume of smoke rises from a spindly chimney pot. There is a half-hearted string of fairy lights in the window, the suggestion of a tree. As I reach the side gate, I hear Jessamine’s dog barking furiously. Then I hear Jessamine saying, “Hugo. Shut up. There’s nobody there.” The dog keeps barking, and eventually I see her face at the small window to the side of the front door.
I ring the doorbell.
chapter fourteen
ALLEN
I was born in 1958, in Beckenham, in deepest South London. My father was undiagnosed bipolar. My mother was addicted to sleeping pills. My childhood was unconventional. When my father was manic, life was fun; when he wasn’t… well. You can imagine. From a very young age I always wanted a wife. I aways wanted children. I wanted apple trees and a neatly folded newspaper and something nice to eat when I got home from work. As a child I wanted to be like the men in the illustrations on the covers of old-fashioned magazines with a pipe and handkerchief in their top pocket, a small child by my side. I wanted to be a family man.
I fell in love with Annie the first time I saw her, but she was only thirteen, so I had to back off and wait. She was my friend’s cousin, and she rarely visited his house, only for birthdays and such. I saw her once a year at most. Then, when she was nineteen or so, I found her in a shady corner of the garden during her uncle’s fiftieth-birthday celebrations, and I told her she looked lovely. That was the beginning.
We spent a couple of years enjoying London, enjoying each other, and then we married. Annie was training to be a nurse, and I was on the Partner program at John Lewis. It was early days, and I wasn’t earning enough to pay rent for us immediately, so her parents said we could live with themand, frankly, I was delighted. A cottage on Hampstead Heath with apple trees in the garden, an easy commute to Oxford Circus, a caring mother-in-law, a kind father-in-law, and of course my beautiful wife. Her mother, Vivienne, took care of both of us so Annie didn’t have to raise a finger, and I liked it that way.
We were treated like a prince and his princess; I had my folded newspaper, my home-cooked meal, but I also had a wife who could spend all day having her nails painted, seeing friends for lunch, paying me surprise visits at work, when I’d whisk her upstairs to the café for a slice of cake or over the road to Cavendish Square Gardens for a cigarette or two.
And then the children arrived.
Jessamine came into the world looking as though she’d been in a street fight. Then there was Jasper, who came into the world two years later looking like a ninety-year-old man. And although of course I loved those children very much, I can’t say they did much to improve my existence. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, as they say. No more impromptu cake in the café; Annie was always stressed, always exhausted, even though, to be entirely honest, her mother—now widowed—did most of the childcare. But still, finding time to do all the things she used to take for granted made her tense and unhappy. By the time I’d been promoted enough times to be able to afford a nice little house for the four of us, Annie had grown somewhat addicted to the presence of her mother, always there to catch the shortfall, and I suppose I was a little addicted to it too, all that space in the middle of London. I knew I could never afford to find us something as good elsewhere, so I spent my income instead on spoiling my family, on nice clothes and expensive toys, on jewelry for Annie. I think, maybe, I felt that I needed to compensate for not providing a roof over my family’s head by giving them absolutely everything else. I didn’t want to see anyone in my family do anything grubby or unpleasant. I liked to see my children comfortably studying or watching children’s TV or playing with a ball or jumping on the trampoline or reading books. I didnot wish to see them scraping cold food off plates or sorting socks or polishing sandals. Annie’s mother was happy to fulfil most of those duties, and what she didn’t manage, I took care of. I wanted to see only contentment and relaxation when I came home from work. Tidy shelves and clean hands and happy people.
You probably think I took advantage of my mother-in-law, but I promise you that wasn’t the case. Vivienne loved to take care of everyone. You’re probably thinking, what is this, the 1950s? What about feminism? What about equal rights? What sort of old fuddy-duddy were you? And frankly, you’d be right. I was an old fuddy-duddy, but God I was happy.
There was only one thing that didn’t quite complete the picture. My darling wife, after the birth of our second child, decided that sex was off the table. Something happened to her inside parts, apparently, some sort of damage, which was fixed by a wonderful surgeon, but her confidence was irreparably dented, and she was scared of another pregnancy, as well as the physical discomfort of intimacy. Of course I understood. Of course I did. She told me I could take a lover. But I didn’t want a lover. There was only one woman who would ever be my lover, and that was Annie. Who else could possibly compare? So I would pay for sex, whenever it was convenient. I visited young women in sad rooms in mansion blocks and over shops and had rough, impersonal sex with them. For many years I was content to live like this. But then Vivienne got ill and was less able to take care of Annie and the children. She tired more easily; her joints hurt. And then she had a terrible fall in her sixties and everything went rapidly downhill after that; she was more like an eighty-year-old than a sixty-three-year-old. She died in the year 2000, when she was only seventy.
One day shortly after she died, I came home to find Annie hanging laundry in the garden and it did not sit well with me. I mentioned it to one of my regular girls. Her name was Tulip, or at least that was her professional name. Her real name, it turned out, was Sandra. She was from theIsle of Wight and had fake breasts that were fashionable at the time, and a tattoo of Betty Boop on her forearm. She said she’d look after us. She said she was good at housework, at cooking, she could serve us meals, take care of the children. She said she would take care of me too.
